Join Master Naturalist Edward Boisits as he provides background on the history of the Eastern Bluebird and discusses the role of the nest box initiative in helping to increase the populations of the beautiful birds to sustainable levels. Following the presentation, participants will build their own nest box using kits provided.

Once common throughout Connecticut, the Eastern Bluebird, the only bluebird species found in New England, has declined in numbers. One significant contributing factor to this decline is the lack of suitable nesting spots needed by the bluebird to successfully raise young. The construction of nest boxes and their establishment in appropriate habitat is helping the bluebird make a comeback. Flanders Nature Center & Land Trust’s ongoing bluebird program has helped bring many Eastern bluebirds back to the area.
Wanting to encourage others to also provide appropriate nesting spots for the birds, this class will provide all the materials needed to build a bluebird box and participants will be creating their own nest box to take home with them. Information and tips needed for installing and maintaining a successful bluebird nest box to encourage these beautiful birds to your property will also be covered.

Saturday, March 2, 2 pm

Cost: $20 for each bluebird nest box builtSpace is limited so preregistration is required.

The White Hart Speaker Series: A captivating debut novel by Whitney Scharer, The Age of Light is based on the true story of Vogue model turned renowned photographer Lee Miller, and her search to forge a new identity as an artist after a life spent as muse to photographer and artist Man Ray.

“Sweeping from the glamour of 1930’s Paris through the battlefields of World War II and into the war’s long shadow, The Age of Light is a startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s self-transformation from muse into artist.”
– Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere

Flanders is pleased to again be offering its popular introductory beekeeping course on the art and science of beekeeping. The workshops will promote the importance of pollinators and show students how to start and keep a hive, as well as brainstorm new ideas to help keep our pollinators alive and thriving. This series will consist of three classes and two field trips to an apiary.

The beekeeping classes will be a hands-on experience with bees and be led by Al Avitabile, Emeritus Professor in the Biology Department at UCONN, co-author of “The Beekeeper’s Handbook” and noted beekeeper and researcher.
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Classes will be held on three consecutive Friday evenings in March. The first session of the program will be held on Friday, March 7 at 7PM in the Flanders Studio. The other two classes will be held on March 14 and 21st. It will also include two Saturday field trips in April to a nearby apiary to install a package of honey bees and to then check on them a week after that installation.

Friday, March 7, 7 pm

Cost for all the sessions: is $85 Flanders’ membersand $120 nonmembersPre-Registration is required.

Many states recognize the legitimate medical use of marijuana and have developed programs with specific protocols and qualifications to become a medical marijuana patient. In Connecticut, the Department of Consumer Protection implements and oversees this program. Currently, there are thousands of registered patients in Connecticut using various Cannabis preparations for the treatment of thirty recognized ailments. Now for the first time since the program’s inception a dispensary, Still River Wellness, will open in the Northwest Corner in Torrington providing more access for residents interested in becoming patients. Previously many patients had to travel an hour or more to reach a dispensary.

On Thursday, March 7, the Scoville Memorial Library will host several presentations followed by a panel discussion about becoming a medical marijuana patient and the use of Cannabis as a treatment. Department of Consumer Protection Commissioner Michelle H. Seagull is one of the presenters. She was appointed Commissioner in May 2017. From 2011 she served as the Deputy Commissioner and led the team that developed DCP’s Medical Marijuana Program.

Additional presenters are Tom Macre from Still River Wellness, and Mark Braunstein, one of the lead proponents of medical legalization and a patient. They will briefly discuss medical Cannabis, the genesis of the program, its growth to over 30,00 patients since its inception, legal requirements and how the state system functions, who qualifies and how, ailments treated with Cannabis, types of preparation and other aspects. According to

Mark Braunstein “Even after 28 years of paraplegia, I remain both self-supporting and self-sufficient. I am productive not despite marijuana, but because of it.”
Braunstein became a paraplegic from a diving accident in 1990. He uses no pharmaceutical drugs, but instead only traditional herbal remedies, including marijuana to treat the spasms and pains of his spinal cord injury. Between 1997 and 2012, he testified eight times before Connecticut’s Judiciary Committee, for the legalization of medical Cannabis.

Tom Macre co-founded the dispensary with his father Tom Sr. Previously they founded MedTech, a Medical Equipment company. There Macre helped providers develop treatment plans for their patients and has worked one-on-one with patients to ensure proper training and education on the safe and effective use of his company’s equipment. Working with pain management physicians, he learned the value that medical marijuana could have for patients suffering from chronic intractable pain and quickly educated himself about the medical marijuana industry and treatments.

After the presentations, a panel discussion moderated by ethnobotanist and library program coordinator Lawrence Davis-Hollander will occur with plenty of time for questions and answers. While the opening of the Torrington dispensary was incidental to the development of this educational program, Davis-Hollander says the library’s timing was good. “ We felt that with so many states allowing the use of medical Cannabis plus additional states legalizing recreational marijuana that it was time to help inform our patrons about their options and remove some of the stigmas this plant has carried for decades.”

Everyone seems to have a great affinity for trees, but wish they could identify more of them. Mark Mikolas, author of “A Beginner’s Guide to Recognizing Trees”, will discuss a new approach that enables people to recognize trees at a glance, just as foresters do. In this friendly and approachable field guide, writer and avid hiker Mark Mikolas share a unique approach for year-round tree identification. Location maps for each of the 40 species covered and more than 400 photographs illustrating key characteristics make the trees easy to identify.

Mikolas has been an avid outdoorsman since being a Boy Scout in the 1950s. He is also the author of “Nature Walks in Southern Vermont”, published by the Appalachian Mountain Club, as well as many magazine articles.

There’s nothing like a Faulkner novel: overwhelming, breath-taking yet suffocating, free. The prose is haunting and maddening; the diction, erudite and home-spun. Then there are the plots that strike to the heart of the tragedy and comedy that is our American project. And then there’s the man, an uneducated alcoholic, singularly ill-prepared to be a Nobel laureate (or any sort of literary type whatsoever). No wonder the mere mention of Faulkner’s name strikes fear into undergrads! And maybe some of us, too. But skip the jitters and join us to explore possibly the greatest American author, certainly one of the greatest novelists ever.

In eight weeks, we’ll cover four novels, have grand discussions of American art and history, and get too-close-for-comfort glimpses of American rancor, Southern defeat, and the happy ending Faulkner believed was the sum of human existence. If it sounds like an avid reader’s notion of bliss, that’s because it is.

First Reading: The Wild Palms (aka If I forget thee, Jerusalem, 1939) Complete

Books will be available on a limited basis at the circulation desk.
Books will be available for sale at Oblong Books & Music

The White Hart Speaker Series: The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets—a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she recently made about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden story of her own life.

Dani Shapiro is the author of the memoirs Hourglass, Still Writing, Devotion, and Slow Motion and five novels including Black & White and Family History. Shapiro’s short fiction, essays, and journalistic pieces have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, One Story, Elle, Vogue, O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, the op-ed pages of the New York Times, and many other publications. She lives with her family in Litchfield County.

Playwright, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, Tony Award nominee, and co-author, Sarah Ruhl will deliver a talk and signing of her recently released book, Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship, named as a Kirkus Best Book of 2018.

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl met Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer.

Over the next four years―in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed―the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife.

“Deeply moving, often heartbreaking . . . a captivating celebration of life and love.”―Kirkus (starred review)

Sarah Ruhl is the author of the book 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has been the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a mid-career playwright, and the Steinberg Award. She is currently on the faculty of the Yale School of Drama and lives in Brooklyn with her family.
Max Ritvo (1990–2016) was the author, with Sarah Ruhl, of Letters from Max. He was also the author of two collections of poems, Four Reincarnations and The Final Voicemails. His chapbook, Aeons, was chosen by Jean Valentine to receive the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship in 2014. Ritvo’s poetry has also appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry, among many other publications.
Saturday, March 23, 11 am